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Under the Shadow of
the Sun Revisited

This project is a continuation and re-evaluation of my previous work Under the Shadow of the Sun. When I first visited the villages of Van many years ago, I used natural light to observe the spontaneous flow of life; I witnessed lives in places where time had almost stopped, far away from the modern world. This time, I aimed to develop a different perspective by returning to the same places with artificial light. The landscapes previously recorded with natural light were this time illuminated with artificial light. The same villages, the same roads, the same faces - but a different look. Because now I wanted to photograph not only what I saw, but also what I felt and remembered. The intervening years have transformed not only time but also visual memory. This project aims to raise questions about the representation of reality by breaking the objectivity of documentary photography through staging and artificial light. These interventions with flash light in open spaces aim to add a subjective interpretation to documentary reality. These choices reflect my changing gaze over time and my reconstructed intellectual distance from the same spaces. While engaging in a dialogue with the visual memory of the previous work, this project demonstrates that revisiting the past is both an aesthetic and intellectual experience. Over time, I realized that not only the photographs but also my own perspective had changed. Under the Shadow of the Sun Revisited is a return journey tracing this transformation. This work proposes that the boundaries of documentary can be challenged, allowing observation to give way to interpretation, and coincidence to fictional intervention. Reality is no longer merely what is seen but what is reconstructed.

© Nadir Buçan. All rights reserved.
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